In the context of communications networks, quality-of-service (QoS) is used as a performance metric to generally describe a network's ability to prioritize applications, users or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. For example, a required bit rate, delay, jitter, packet-dropping probability, bit error rate or other network performance metric may be guaranteed based on a network's QoS standards. From the perspective of a mobile client such as a smart-phone or a tablet, it is generally desirable to determine a network's quality-of-service standards beforehand to minimize network transition time, such as time spent having to pair or connect to a new network.
From a network administrator's perspective, however, it is often desirable to regulate, control or even deny a mobile client's ability to pair or connect to a network based on timing, available bandwidth or various other administrative policy reasons. For example, an enterprise may provide a network service wherein its employees can automatically transition to the enterprise network when they are within communication range (e.g., within the enterprise headquarters). The enterprise may also wish to offer faster and managed connectivity to other users located within communication range who would like to transition to the network merely for the increased QoS that they might experience. As such, the enterprise (and other similar network service providers) may be required to take an approach to network administrative policy that ensures the network's QoS to both its personnel and to others.
One challenge of mobile communication networks, however, is that a network transition initiated by the network provider cannot be QoS-sensitive because the QoS of a wireless medium such as a mobile client depends on location, signal strength, a number of other active clients and other variables that may not be determinable from the network provider side. On the other hand, a client-initiated approach to network transitions must still address the issue of enforcing network administrative policy controls (whether or not QoS-sensitivity is achieved). While QoS-sensitive network transitions are generally more desirable, it would be advantageous to employ a network transition solution that also adheres to network administrative policy controls so that improved determinations of whether to transition between networks can be made.